Historical Data

When you first join Black Box Intelligence we require that you submit a file with your historical sales and traffic data and a “Units Open Date” file.

For us to be able to report your results for a given week, we must have 78 weeks of data behind it. We report a 52 week trend of your data on a weekly basis, so we must receive at least 130 weeks of historical data in order to provide this data. We can accept data as far back as the beginning of 2007 and would prefer to accept as much data as you can provide. This data must be accompanied by a one-time Units Open Date file described below.

78 weeks (18 months) of data allows us to provide Year-over-Year comparable results for 1 week of data (regardless of the open date of the unit).

Why is this?We have established 18 months as the baseline for what constitutes a comparable unit. Therefore to be included in our comparable calculations, a unit must be opened consistently for a minimum of 18 months. We collect open dates to help validate that units should be considered comparable units. However, in order to validate that a unit has been consistently open and is indeed a comparable unit, we must have this lead data for 18 months.

In addition, since all metrics are reported compared to the previous year, we can only report data for periods for which we have a data point to compare the current period to. In other words, providing data back to the beginning of 2013 does not yield comparable data dating back to January of 2013.

The Trends Dashboard contains 3 years of comparable results. In order to show the full trend line in this dashboard, we must have a total of 4.5 years worth of data.

File Structure (Units Open Date)This is a tab delimited file. It will contain field headings on the first row and each unit’s ID, open date and unit type on a separate row beneath this as follows:UnitID : Same UnitID provided in Historical and Weekly data filesOpenDate: Date that the unit opened (format: yyyy-mm-dd)UnitType: Type of unit location (format: ‘F’ for free-standing, ‘I’ for in-line, ‘M’ for mall, ‘A’ for airport, or ‘O’ for other)